Guatemalan Government Apologizes to Victims of Illegal Adoptions

 👇As the theft of children from their families and the subsequent illegal adoption became a tactic of war, it also became a political market.

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ANOTHER COUNTRY? Government Apologizes to Victims of Illegal Adoptions

By Jeff Abbott 7/22/2024

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Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo has taken an important step in seeking justice for tens of thousands of children illegally adopted from the Central American country. 

On July 12, the president made a public apology to the parents of two children illegally adopted by a family in the United States in 1997. This is the first time that the Guatemalan government has made a public apology for illegal adoptions carried out in the country between 1977 and 2008.

The public apology was in response to the case of Osmín Tobar Ramírez, who was seven years old in 1997 when he and his younger brother, Jeffrey Arias Ramírez, who was nearly two years old, were taken from their family by the Guatemalan state and housed in the Asociación Los Niños de Guatemala orphanage. They were put up for adoption, an act that would later be revealed to be illegal. 

“It was something sensational,” Gustavo Tobar, their biological father, tells The Progressive. “I never thought I would be in front of the highest authorities of the country, in an act especially dedicated to us. You feel a positive energy, you feel nervous, you feel everything, but it is something wonderful, it is something very wonderful.”

In 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Osmín and Jeffrey’s parents after years of searching for the children and struggling to find justice in Guatemala, where their complaints were met with disinterest from authorities. The court ruled that the Guatemalan state had violated the rights of the family and that a criminal network had financially benefited from the trafficking of the brothers through adoption, ordering that the Guatemalan government apologize to them and set up a commission to find the children that were sold as part of the illegal adoption scheme. 

“We sought justice here in Guatemala,” Tobar says. “We went to courts [in Guatemala], but they did not want to touch the issues. So we had to find an international court so that they could be heard. Everything seemed very long.” 

He adds, “But thanks to God, after twenty-seven years we had that glimmer of hope, that the government of Guatemala would apologize for all the atrocities that were committed against us.”

Osmín and his brother were taken by the state and adopted out during the darkest days of Guatemala’s internal armed conflict, when criminal networks would steal children and put them up for adoption. Arévalo’s public apology comes as a welcome shift for those who have been seeking justice for decades. 

“It was a historic step after a long struggle,” Mariela SR Coline Fanon, the President of the Lost Roots Foundation and who herself was illegally adopted from Guatemala in the 1980s, tells The Progressive. 

“The Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued this sentence before the state because really the apologies were one with an international sentence that the state of Guatemala should comply with the order,” she explains. “It opens the door for everyone. It is a first step.” 

Between 1977 and 2008, Guatemala became one of the primary countries in the world for illegal adoptions, just ahead of Russia and China.  During those years there were an estimated 30,000 cases of children being illegally adopted from the Central American country before international adoptions were made illegal in 2008. Each adoption cost between $12,000 and $80,000. 

Many of the people involved with the illegal adoption scheme were directly connected to Guatemalan political and business leaders, meaning these crimes have largely gone unpunished and families have remained separated. 

“Impunity cannot be the only response to what happened,” Fanon says. After discovering her story at age thirty, she wrote a book entitled Mamá, No Estoy Muerta (Mom, I Am Not Dead) that documents her own kidnapping, adoption, quest for justice, and meeting her biological mother. 

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Rachel Nolan, a researcher who published the book Until I Find You: Disappeared Children and Coercive Adoptions in Guatemala, outlined five circumstances under which these adoptions took place: children were forcibly disappeared; they were kidnapped; women were coerced into giving up their children; women saw giving up their child as the best option and did so willingly; and a small number of children were truly abandoned.

In recent decades, organizations like Fanon’s Lost Roots Foundation have sought to reconnect these stolen children with their families in Guatemala. There are similar efforts occurring across the hemisphere in countries that were impacted by the formation of these illicit markets. 

During the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, thousands of children were illegally adopted from the country, and many families are still searching for these missing children. American and British families traveled to El Salvador to adopt, paying as much as $20,000.

Chilean justice officials and other social groups are currently investigating at least 20,000 cases of children being illegally adopted by families abroad under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990. Families in Chile are still searching for their missing children.

As the theft of children from their families and the subsequent illegal adoption became a tactic of war, it also became a political market.

“There was a conflict, there were orphaned children, there were really, but it’s not really a need at the beginning, but it became a market; a market for selling children,” Fanon says. “There are people who say that adoptions are not political. They are wrong, because it is political.” 

But now, following the public act in Guatemala, the work to find and reconnect families with their children who were forcibly disappeared by being put up for adoption can begin. This was just the first step in a long process, which has been and will be met by resistance from those who seek to maintain their immunity. 

“This is this public act that crossed our borders, and now many adoptees are turning to see us so that we can support them in relocating their biological families,” Tobar says. 

He adds, “We are going to create a commission for search and reunion, and for truth.”

 

👇👇👇FROM TRACE:  In my book One Small Sacrifice, the U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT was already warning people NOT to adopt from Guatemala - Why? SMUGGLING babies AND Human Trafficking! 

Guatemala

At this moment, the adoption experiment is spreading to more impoverished people; Guatemala is the new supplier of fresh infants, free to adopt in America but I really don’t mean free. I read the State Department warnings online in 2009 and I found new international guidelines preventing Third World adoptions. I’ve even met a few adoptees from Guatemala. They say Americans began shopping and adopting Mayan children over 20 years ago. Some of them were sold to Americans who wanted to save them.

Guatemala is the size of Tennessee but has 24 Indigenous languages, principally Kiche, Kaqchikel, Q’eqchi and Mam.  More than half in their country are descendents of indigenous Mayan people.  The Mayan people were colonized by Spain in 1523–24.

Now 80 percent of the population lives in poverty and two-thirds of them – 7.6 million – live in extreme poverty; In addition to earning low incomes, the Mayan have limited economic opportunities for jobs and advancement, no social services, and very limited access or influence on their government’s policymaking.

Sound familiar?